The project has been running for some time from its London Victoria base, fuelled by some extremely innovative thinking about how to plan and build a 'next generation' Government offering to connect to UK citizens in a simpler and more elegant way than the current site. UKOnline gets high usership: over 500,000 unique users per month delivering over 3 million page impressions.
Patricia Hewitt, secretary of state at the DTI, said last week that the UKOnline portal would be upgraded, in response to an independent review of government communications by Guardian Media Group chairman Bob Phillis, which said that UK Online fell short of its aim of providing a single site for all government services. But the project has been planning for a long time and well before publication of this report, and the report only told the project team what it knew anyway.
Planning the new look UKOnline has proved highly challenging - how do you interface 2,000+ public sector organisations, let alone the central few tens of most-used government services with a population using different access devices, different languages, and with different levels of web awareness and bandwidth. The resultant new UKOnline will be, by definition, a best-compromise which aims to satisfy all users, but which cannot afford to ignore a great diversity of user segments who are challenging to cater for.
The project team has spent a lot of time look at HCI, interface and usability issues and is expected to deliver a "chassis'' of a new portal which has future extensibility, to handle the expected growth of both central and local eGovernment services over the next 3-5 years. The portal (if successful) will also need to be a central linkage point around which government services can 'join up' online - and may prove to be the glue which makes e-Government really happen in the UK.
Related articles:
- So just how successful is UKOnline then? Take a guess then read on..- Friday, October 17, 2003
- Analysis: A detailed look at the UK Online 2003 annual report- Tuesday, December 16, 2003
